Building East Germany
In 1945 Mielke was returned to Germany by the Soviet authorities as a police inspector, with a mandate to build up a security force which would ensure the dominance of the Communist Party in the Soviet occupation zone of Germany. Mielke was a protege of NKGB General Ivan Serov, who was headquartered at the Berlin suburb of Karlshorst. On August 16, 1947, Serov ordered the creation of Kommissariat 5, the first German political police since the defeat of Nazi Germany. Wilhelm Zaisser was appointed the organization's head and Mielke as installed as his deputy.
According to John Koehler,
"The K-5 was essentially an arm of the Soviet secret police. Its agents were carefully selected veteran German communists who had survived the Nazi era in Soviet exile or in concentration camps and prisons. Their task was to track down Nazis and anti-communists, including hundreds of members of the Social Democratic Party. Mielke and his fellow bloodhounds performed this task with ruthless precision. The number of arrests became so great that the regular prisons could not hold them. Thus, Serov ordered the establishment or re-opening eleven concentration camps, including the former Nazi death camps of Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen."
Read more about this topic: Erich Mielke
Famous quotes containing the words building, east and/or germany:
“There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“Sublime tobacco! which from east to west
Cheers the tar’s labour or the Turkman’s rest.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“If Germany is to become a colonising power, all I say is, “God speed her!” She becomes our ally and partner in the execution of the great purposes of Providence for the advantage of mankind.”
—W.E. (William Ewart)